Massively goes to WAR: Spotlight on the Chaos Marauder

In the balance of our time viewing the ins and outs of Warhammer Online, Josh Drescher and Adam Gershowitz gave us a big portion of their day. After giving us a high level overview of all the classes (which you'll see here on the site later today), there was a few moments left over for personal favorites. At Josh's urging, Adam logged into a Chaos Marauder to show off the mutational fury of that faction's front line. This melee warrior's capabilities are predicated on the internal darkness that boils into his skin, malforms his limbs, and gives him the capability to cause massive amounts of damage.

His karmic doppelganger, the High Elf Shadow Warrior, is likely to get played more just by virtue of elven popularity. Still, the Marauder's place in the Warhammer world has its own horrific charm. Read on for details on their meat clubs, axe hands, and the aptly-named 'Wave of Horror.'

The Marauder had just freshly come off the assembly line from Adam's class team, having received some new tweaks and polish to his grotesque armor.

The entire class is based around mutating stances. His masteries allow him to focus in a general area of combat, but mutation stances focus him down even further onto a very small subset of his abilities. Those powers become very strong as a result. In melee, he mutates horrifically, transforming his arm into a blade, an axe, a claw. The character's hotbar changes automatically as you transform, locking out some powers and greatly enhancing others.

Interestingly, the mutations are highly random. They're entirely cosmetic, but still very engaging: one use of a power might transform your arm into a beast's claw. Another use (sometime later) might show your arm as a dragon's talon. One use may offer up a green dragon's claw, another a red dragon's. There are a number of different palettes available, but every use of the power will show a different 'side' of the Marauder's internal chaos.

The different mutations each have different roles:

Claws are about rending armor, debuffing opponents over time. This is known as the Path of Savagery.

Arm blades and the Path of Brutality, are about high DPS on a single target, slicing and dicing, impaling them.

The Path of Monstrosity, the 'meat clubs' or bludgeons, are about knockdowns and AoE attacks.

These mutations are combined with their traditional one-handed weapons and brutal armor to present a terrifying visage on the battlefield. Both Adam and Josh were giddy with excitement over some of the Chaos warrior's powers. Their favorites are:

Terrible Embrace: "You basically reach out to a target 50 feet away with this enormous tentacle and yank him back to you." The jet-black cord will be unmistakable on the battlefield.

Wave of Horror: Huge tentacles spew from the character's back, wriggling wildly, before slipping back into the Marauder's flesh. "Now, that looks cool, but what it's actually just a detaunt. On monsters it will make them run away, or snap onto another character. In RvR it makes every player you're not attacking do less damage when they hit you." The screenshot just to the right shows just what these tentacled nightmares look like.